Jack Stocker

A friend of mine by the name of Jack Stocker has died. He passed away this morning after having a massive stroke on Monday. He was 85, and long retired from teaching chemistry at the University of New Orleans.

Jack was not the kind of friend I saw every week, or even every year, but he was far more than an acquaintance. I met him at an SF/Fantasy con and that’s usually where I saw him. He often had a used book table at the local cons and would sit on a panel or two. I was on a few panels with him, and bought a lot of books from him. In the early days I got about half my Burroughs and Howard collection from him. Many of those were outright gifts. Jack loved to share with others his passion for good reads.

Jack also sold my books for me at the cons where we both were guests, and I often helped him pack up his books after the festivities were over. That stopped after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, because Jack lost his house and every one of his 20,000 plus volumes to the storm. Another man than Jack might have despaired after that, but Jack didn't let it beat him down. Although I know it hurt him.

Jack was instrumental in helping get me invited as a guest to my first con. He was a fan’s fan. Even in his 80s he was as eager as a little kid to talk about books, and his knowledge of SF/Fantasy was encyclopedic. I had many fun discussions with him over the year, and though I didn’t always agree with him there’s no one whose opinion on SF/Fantasy that I respect more.

Jack, you are missed, my friend.
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There’s No Pleasing Me

Sometimes I guess there’s no pleasing me. Back earlier in the year I posted about gratuitous violence and singled out the Edge Western Series for criticism. I also criticized the main character of the series, Edge himself, as a unrepentant sociopath. That post was “How Much Violence is Too Much?”.

Now let it be known, I do think the author, George G. Gilman (Terry Harknet), is a decent writer. The stories had a strong narrative drive and there were some pretty funny moments of black humor. But in general, I was just bothered by the unnecessary violence, and I found out later that at least some of this violence was included at the behest of the publisher and was not Gilman’s idea.

So then a friend told me that Gilman had written some later books in the series, long after the original run of the books had come to a close, that featured an older and less violent Edge. He pointed me to a website where I could download six of these as ebooks. I did so, and just finished the first one, called The Quiet Gun, on my Kindle. The verdict is: “I didn’t really like it.”

That’s where the title of my post comes from. I wanted Edge less violent and less sociopathic! Well, I got that in spades, and more. By age fifty, it appears that Edge has turned from a complete sociopath to a generally mild mannered fellow bent at all costs on staying on the right side of the law. He doesn’t even wear his gun anymore—he carries it in a carpetbag—and he’s dressed more like a “dude” than a gunslinger. He was trying to buy a wagon to get into the freight business, and didn’t even like to ride a horse anymore. In the first part of the book, he walked everywhere. It definitely felt like an alternate universe Edge. In fact, if I’d met the character in this book for the first time I would have thought he was something of a wimp.

As the book continued, Edge toughened up again and began to show flashes of the old Edge. He never, however, returned to the complete disregard for human life and decency that he’d shown in the early books of the original series. By the end, he’d become something of a gunslinger again but with apparent respect for the law and with some internal integrity. That was more in line with the kind of character I was looking for, but I was still reeling from the early story of the “meek shall inherit the earth” Edge. I guess there’s no pleasing me.

If you’d like to download the ebooks of the Older Edge series, the link is here.

And for a different view from someone who really liked the Edge series, the writer R. J. Dent, here’s another link.

As with anything, don’t just blindly accept my opinion on these books. If you’re curious, follow-up yourself. Your reading experience may vary!
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Friday's Forgotten Books: Five-Yard Fuller

For quite a few years I’d been keeping an eye open for a book called Five-Yard Fuller, which I probably last read when I was around 10. I finally found a copy through Amazon’s associates program and ordered it. As soon as I opened it up and saw the interior illustration of a tall young man in overalls running through a crowd of football players with the ball over his head, the memories came flooding back. I just had to reread it.

Five-Yard Fuller was written by Bob Wells. It features a young man named Clarence Fuller who decides he wants to play football for the Knights, a professional football team very much down on its luck. In fact, their rather hapless abilities reminded me a lot of the New Orleans Saints in their heyday of mediocrity. Fuller has never played organized football, only sandlot ball, but he tells the coach of the Knights that it looks pretty easy. You just “take that little ball in your hand and move it down to where them two posts are standing.”

The coach decides to teach Fuller a lesson and lets him try it. The result is that Fuller scores a touchdown by running over the entire defensive unit. And thus a star is born.

I first discovered Five-Yard Fuller in my local small town library. I don’t know exactly what year I read it but it was published in 1964. To my amazement, and some slight irritation, I found there were actually some sequels to this book. I sure would have liked to have read those too back in the day. One was called Five-Yard Fuller and the Unlikely Knights. Another was Five-Yard Fuller’s Mighty Model T, and yet another was Five-Yard Fuller and the NY Gnats, which, from what I’ve been able to glean on the net is actually about Fuller playing baseball. All were published in the sixties.

I had not realized, until I reread the book, that the Adam Sandler movie The Waterboy was apparently based pretty closely on the Wells book, although the book is much, much better. There are just too many similarities to be a coincidence, although I never heard of any acknowledgement from the movie folks that this was the case. Maybe Wells should have gotten some of the $160 million that movie was supposed to have earned. I don’t know if Wells is still living but my guess is not. I couldn’t find out much about the author on the net. The problem seems to be that there are too many folks named Bob or Robert Wells who have been authors. If anyone knows anything about this Bob Wells I’d appreciate you letting me know.

This is definitely a young adult/kid’s book. It’s probably not the cup of tea of many of you out there, but it sure did bring back some pleasant memories.
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In the Beginning

Beginnings are exciting. Moving to a new home. Launching a new career. The first weeks or months of a new relationship. (In many ways, my relationship with Lana still seems new after years of togetherness.) There is promise, hope, and some uncertainty in beginnings. I even like the beginning of a meal at a new restaurant, or the first sip of a strange new brew. It could be that something wonderful is in store.

For readers and writers, the beginning of a story, whether one they are reading or writing, has the same promise, hope, and uncertainty. I love openings. I love to read good ones and I strive to write them. It’s not easy.

To me, the single best opening sentence of any book I’ve read is from Fred Saberhagen’s First Book of Swords. “In what felt to him like the first cold morning of the world, he groped for fire.” Perhaps inevitably, the rest of the book did not quite live up to that promise.

Two great openings that did live up to the promise are from Joe Lansdale’s The Nightrunners, and from Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, a masterpiece of suspense.

Here’s Lansdale: “Midnight. Black as the heart of Satan. They came rolling out of the darkness in a black ’66 Chevy; eating up Highway 59 North like so much juicy, grey taffy.”

Here’s Straub: “Because he thought that he would have problems taking the child over the border into Canada, he drove south, skirting the cities whenever they came and taking the anonymous freeways which were like a separate country, as travel was itself like a separate country.”

These openings captivated me; I had had to read more. But I’ll tell you one opening that shut me down immediately. It was to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire “’’I see-‘ said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.” I put this book down immediately and have never read any of Rice's vampire/witch books. It just seemed so completely lame.

There are those who will accuse me of liking purple prose, but I don’t. I like intensity. I like emotion. I like to be dragged in by the power of the prose. I like to be made uncomfortable. The Rice book opened with a complete lack of threat. We seem to be sitting in a comfortable chair, perhaps having a cognac and a cigar. That’s nice on a cold winter night, but it’s not what I want to invest my reading time in. It’s not what I want to invest my writing time in.

Here's the opening to the first short story I sold, called “Still Life With Skulls.”

“There were eyes in the canvas that I had never drawn, desert eyes of bronze, sulfur eyes like cicatrixes, and river eyes of green--eyes full of dark wings and teeth. There were round mouths open to the night air, and sanguine tongues whose dance burned with holy words. And in the chiaroscuro wastelands of the unfilled canvas there were ruins whose outlines I could not yet trace. I knew only that they held a bitter rapture and smelled faintly of ashes.”

This is the beginning to the second vampire tale I sold, called “A Cold of Snow and Ghosts:”

“He ran northward across the frozen tundra, with the pure light of the Aurora streaming above him in broad arcs that sparked green and red with ionization. His flying feet seemed barely to skim the ground, leaving behind prints in the snow that were as delicate as fallen petals, and as ephemeral. Over his shoulder hung a caribou stag with its throat wrapped in a necklace of frozen black blood. He hoped that he would be in time.”

What about you? How important are beginnings for you? Whether in reading, writing, or anywhere else? What are some of your favorite openings?
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Taken

I finally got around to watching Taken tonight and I really enjoyed it. I’d call it the feel good movie of the year. The story is about a father whose daughter is kidnapped by slavers in France and who then hunts the kidnappers down and kills them. Liam Neeson plays the father and the old man can ‘do’ some action moves. For a while, Lana and I were having bad luck with our movie picks, but the last couple, Taken and Gran Torino, have been pretty good.

The scary thing is, of course, that such evils do happen and too often are allowed to happen by the corruption in our governments and police forces. I see in Greater New Orleans the police setting up speed traps to catch working people on their way to and from their jobs, and to ticket those who aren’t wearing their seat belts. I see them arresting taggers and throwing them into jail where they can clutter up the courts rather than just giving them fines. I see them setting up stings to arrest prostitutes and Johns rather than getting the pimps and organized crime figures who run the prostitutes. The police are gung ho on the small time criminals. Generally they seem to leave the big ones alone, and almost certainly it is because someone’s palm is getting greased.

A week ago we had two interesting police related events that happened only a day apart. It was announced one day that many thousands of dollars had gone missing from the evidence lockers of the NOPD; the very next day we heard how the police department needed a big increase in funding in order to keep our streets safe from criminals. Maybe they should just check their evidence lockers for the criminals. They could cut crime a lot faster and wouldn’t need any additional funding. Hell, they wouldn’t even need cars. The crime is happening right on their own premises.

Of course, there are plenty of good police officers. But where are the priorities of those who are assigning those officers to duty? The person without the seat belt is likely to hurt themselves before they hurt anyone else. The taggers should be fined if they deface public property, but do we need to clog up the courts with such cases? Set the fines, make ‘em steep if you want, but put the focus of the court and law systems on the big time criminals who fester like ticks on the body of the country.

Seems to me, we’re all being “taken.”
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Snakes and the Wild West

Despite the brutal heat here in southern Louisiana in June, I’ve been getting out occasionally in the late evening for short walks. And it appears from my walks that our local snake population is doing quite well. Almost every evening I’ve been out, I’ve seen a small snake on the road. I don’t believe they are the same snake, although they look close enough alike to be kin. I’ve seen them in at least three fairly widespread locations. I finally took the camera with me and snapped a few pics. They all look like the one featured here.

The most disconcerting thing about these wee ones is that they look a bit like copperheads to me, although I’ve not gotten down at eye level with them in an attempt to verify that. Even a small snake can cause a man to dance a jig when you nearly step on one. And snakes hardly ever invite you to pull up a patch of ground and visit. They just don’t seem all that friendly a creature.

In other news, I got my copy of The Tarnished Star, by Jack Martin (aka Gary Dobbs), and finished it in a couple of days. It’s really good. Fast paced, and well written in a straightforward, no nonsense style. The characters are clearly defined and you know who to root for. There’s the sheriff, a true upholder of the law, and his fiancé, who is actually a school teacher. There’s a local big rancher who runs roughshod over his opposition. He isn’t completely a villain, but he hasn’t done a good job of raising his spoiled son and therein lies the rub.

There’s considerable action in the book but not a lot of gore. I’ve been thinking lately of the “sub-genres” of western fiction. I’d certainly include The Tarnished Star as a “traditional” western. Think Louis L’Amour and James Reasoner. This is in opposition to the “spaghetti” western, such as the books by Joe Millard featuring the Eastwood character “blonde,” the “hyper-violent” western such as the Edge series by George Gilman, or the “adult” westerns such as the Trailsman or the Longarm series.

All in all, a very promising debut novel from our blogosphere friend.
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Father's Day, Sushi, and Talera

G., over at Cedar’s Mountain has a review of the second Talera Novel, Wings Over Talera. He is apparently an extremely discerning fellow, seeing as how he liked the book quite a lot. Thanks for the kind words, G.

My son came out Saturday for Father’s Day since he had to work a double shift on Sunday. We had a great time. We went to my favorite sushi place. We had our first official beer together while out to eat. After that we did some target shooting with my air pistol, watched Pale Rider, and then he helped me set up my DVD with surround sound. He also bought me the five disk collected works of White Zombie, which to me was better stuff than the material that Rob Zombie has produced separately since. Good kid!

I’ve been on a real sushi kick lately. I had it twice last week on Monday, then Saturday and Sunday this weekend. Love the stuff. Maybe part of it is the variety of the meal. There are many different flavors to a typical sushi meal. I’m a big fan of tuna in all its varieties, especially tuna tataki and pepper tuna. I’ll probably go again tomorrow.
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